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Despite the exhortations of marquee writers and the Cooper Union community, the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York will not get the rent break it had been petitioning for, Publishers Weekly reports. "They'd like to rent the space for twice what we're paying," said St. Mark’s co-owner Bob Contant. "They're going to have to answer to the community for the decision they made. We're extremely disappointed."

Books They Gave Me: A (Tim O’Brien inspired?) Tumblr dedicated to literary relics of past lovers.

“In the American dream, a man enters the wilderness to fashion a home for his family out of the abundant raw materials of the continent. The Canadian dream is much more lonely and rough. A man goes into the backcountry and becomes wild”: Stephen Marche explains the Canadian obsession with hockey.

At New York Magazine, Emily Nussbaum assesses how the internet has changed the conversation surrounding feminism.

On Tuesday, NYU hosted a panel discussion titled “From the Publishers’ Perspective” that featured Dutton’s Brian Tart, HarperMedia’s Ana Maria Allessi, and FSG’s Sarah Crichton. As PW points out, one of the major themes was uncertainty. According to Tart, “You learn to fail really quickly.”

H&M is launching a new clothing line based on the fictional stylings of Lisbeth Salander, the anarcho-hacker heroine from Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

We were thrilled to see the lineup of authors who will be at Page Turner 2011, the third annual Asian American Literary Festival, which will take place at Brooklyn’s PowerHouse books on Saturday, October 29. Just a handful of the writers who will participate: Junot Díaz, Amitav Ghosh, Jessica Hagedorn, Kimiko Hahn, Hari Kunzru, Jayne Anne Phillips, Suketu Mehta, Teju Cole, Alexander Chee, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Monica Youn.

Oliver Stone is adaptingThe Power Broker, Robert Caro’s brilliant brick of a Robert Moses biography, into an HBO special.

At the Awl, Lili Loufbourow writes beautifully about a 1656 pamphlet titled The Academy of Pleasure, details “the sorry state of sexual expression,” and presents a challenge: “Save the slangforest. Breed dirty words.” We are surprised, however, that she does not weigh in on the merits of Nicholson Baker’s House of Holes, or his usage of terms such as “thundertube of dickmeat.”

In the wake of news that Bibles are among the most frequently downloaded Apps, the New Yorker’s Book Bench blog contacted heads of several New York City religious institutions to ask how the digital age is transforming worship.

The Baffler has just signed a $500,000 deal with MIT Press guaranteeing three issues a year for the next five years. Surveying the deal, the Observer catches a new name on the masthead: twenty-four-year-old hacker Aaron Schwartz, who made headlines this summer for leaking four million JSTOR articles.

Legendary book designer Chip Kidd, most recently known for designing the cover of Murakami’s 1Q84, will write an original Batman graphic novel, tentatively titled "Batman: Death By Design.”

A new iPad app calls Subtext lets readers add links and have “Facebook style discussions” within their e-books.

“He invited me back to his house that night at about 2 or 2:30 in the morning, and I noticed this beautiful nickel-plated 12-gauge shotgun on his wall. I was raised around weapons all my life, being from Kentucky, so I said, 'Wow, that’s a really good-looking 12-gauge.' And he said, 'Would you like to fire it?' And I said, 'Yeah, sure, I’ll fire it.' And he said, 'Shit, man, we must build a bomb!' So we built this bomb out of propane tanks and nitroglycerin, took it out in his backyard, and he gave me first crack” — Johnny Depp recalls his friendship with Hunter S. Thompson.

Triple Canopy excerpts artist David Wojnarowicz’s journals: “May 7th spent the afternoon developing photos—most in the Rimbaud series—others from the ‘shoot-from-hip’ series—excited about them, they’re fine images semi-ghostly bald men in leather eating in restaurants faces whirling with darkness reflected in opposite mirrors&hellip; four o’clock rolls around—½ hour till the meeting—I finished up in the darkroom I rent on Prince Street from some old walrus ex-ship captain fella who has tons of shots of Mexico on the studio walls. A real grumpy fart. Paid him his fee and split to a nearby Cafeteria for some coffee and a cigarette—spread photos out—selected best printed ones and then headed on over to the B’WAY offices.”

Bottom-basement pricing on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet has resulted in quarterly losses for the company. But this is probably good news in the long run, the Observer explains: “at $200 cheaper than the iPad, even if Amazon’s profits are marginal because of the sunken price, they’re selling what essentially amounts to a license to buy more stuff from Amazon.com.”

In a related sign of the times, attendance spiked at this year's Self-Publishing Book Expo.

"How did I feel about the war when I was in it?" Joseph Heller wrote in a three-page letter to be auctioned this week. "Much differently than Yossarian felt and much differently than I felt when I wrote the novel &hellip; In truth I enjoyed it and so did just about everyone else I served with, in training and even in combat... I was young, it was adventurous, there was much hoopla and glamour; in addition, and this too is hard to get across to college students today, for me and for most others, going into the army resulted immediately in a vast improvement in my standard of living."

Triple Canopy excerpts artist David Wojnarowicz’s journals: “May 7th spent the afternoon developing photos—most in the Rimbaud series—others from the ‘shoot-from-hip’ series—excited about them, they’re fine images semi-ghostly bald men in leather eating in restaurants faces whirling with darkness reflected in opposite mirrors&hellip; four o’clock rolls around—½ hour till the meeting—I finished up in the darkroom I rent on Prince Street from some old walrus ex-ship captain fella who has tons of shots of Mexico on the studio walls. A real grumpy fart. Paid him his fee and split to a nearby Cafeteria for some coffee and a cigarette—spread photos out—selected best printed ones and then headed on over to the B’WAY offices.”

Bottom-basement pricing on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet has resulted in quarterly losses for the company. But this is probably good news in the long run, the Observer explains: “at $200 cheaper than the iPad, even if Amazon’s profits are marginal because of the sunken price, they’re selling what essentially amounts to a license to buy more stuff from Amazon.com.”

In a related sign of the times, attendance spiked at this year's Self-Publishing Book Expo.

"How did I feel about the war when I was in it?" Joseph Heller wrote in a three-page letter to be auctioned this week. "Much differently than Yossarian felt and much differently than I felt when I wrote the novel &hellip; In truth I enjoyed it and so did just about everyone else I served with, in training and even in combat... I was young, it was adventurous, there was much hoopla and glamour; in addition, and this too is hard to get across to college students today, for me and for most others, going into the army resulted immediately in a vast improvement in my standard of living."

From the LRB archives, Richard Sennett explains how his interest in sexuality and solitude overlaps and varies from Michel Foucault's.

And because it's a slow literary news day, here's a short round-up of recommended reading: Frank Rich reads the Occupy Wall Street movement as the beginning of class warfare; an 1859 article from the Atlantic asks if women should learn the alphabet.

Steve Jobs’s authorized biography comes out today. Among the highlights, Jobs wanted to revolutionize the $8-billion-a-year textbook industry by giving textbooks away for free with iPads; he declared “thermonuclear war” against Google for copying iPhone features in its Android phone; and he regretted waiting to undergo surgery for his pancreatic cancer.

In an echo of the Juan Williams affair, NPR has fired freelancer Lisa Simeone for her involvement with the Occupy Washington D.C. movement. Simeone hosts the World of Opera program, and works for the show Soundprint, both of which are produced by NPR-affiliate stations and distributed through National Public Radio. She was fired after the conservative Daily Caller website accused her of violating the taxpayer-subsidized station’s ethics policy. “I don’t cover politics,” Simeone said to a left-wing blog after her firing. “What is NPR afraid I’ll do—insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?”

Is it illegal for politicians to use campaign contributions to buy their own books? Herman Cain—author of This is Herman Cain!—doesn’t seem to think so.

Your daily dose of Murakami-mania: The New York Times Magazine runs Sam Anderson’s breathless account of visiting the author in Tokyo—where Anderson was shocked to find that Murakami’s cool cosmopolitan capital bore little resemblance to the radically foreign city he immediately got lost in—and Parul Seghal poses six questions to Jay Rubin, Murakami’s longtime translator.

Apple’s new virtual newsstand—an app that lets iPad and iPhone users store their digital publications—has led to a big spike in magazine downloads. Since Newsstand launched last week, the New York Times and National Geographic apps have jumped to the top of "most downloaded" lists, and The Spectator and Le Monde Diplomatique have also enjoyed big jumps, as hasThe Daily. “So what is Newsstand’s secret weapon, its viral ingredient?” Ponyter ventures a guess: “It is, I think, the shelves.”

“I hit on the first sentence while walking,” Hisham Matar tells Hari Kunzru about his second novel, Anatomy of a Disappearance. “And it’s, ‘There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.’ I kept repeating the sentence in my head and thought, okay, this is a sentence that has in it the music, the DNA, the logic of this character in this book and I will let the sentence write the next sentence and so on.” In the new issue of Guernica, Kunzru and Matar talk about the book, the revolution in Libya, and living under repressive regimes.

n+1 is launching a Kickstarter to fund a new editorial project, the OccupyWall Street Gazette.

Nearly five years after Norman Mailer’s death, an indoor treehouse the author built at the top of his Brooklyn brownstone is at the center of a real estate dispute. After putting down a $208,750 security deposit on the place in July, the buyer has filed suit against the Mailer estate for failing to alert him that the renovations might not be up to code.

While on an assignment for Huff-Po, Naomi Wolff joins Wall Street protesters, gets arrested, and inspires a photo-op.